The Minerva Patrolmen

One of the two objects dropped to about a thousand feet and blazed with an intense light. Then both shot away to the east faster than a jet. Patrolman Frank McCurry watched it happen at about five in the morning on 18 September 1962 from State Route 80 near Minerva in Stark County, Ohio. According to the archive's telling he saw two bluish-white oblong objects rise from the south-east, glowing with their own light. They hung for about a minute at thirty to thirty-five degrees above the horizon before the descent. The telling adds that two Minerva policemen saw the same objects independently from about seven miles away.

What is on the record

The sighting is in NICAP's catalogue. Richard Hall's The UFO Evidence, published in 1964, lists it with six policemen as witnesses. McCurry was also interviewed by Marc Candusso of the Flying Saucer Investigations Committee, and that interview survives in an archive. The outside summary describes several officers in north-eastern Ohio seeing luminous objects, one hovering while two manoeuvred. Nobody has put forward an explanation.

Two corrections apply. Our video calls the patrolman David McCurry, while the interview archive names him Frank McCurry. Our telling speaks of three police witnesses in all, and NICAP's catalogue counts six.

Our telling names three claimants: McCurry, Delmas Early and a patrolman named Nelson. The last two appear nowhere else. If NICAP's count is right, the archive holds half of the officers who saw something that morning.

Why it sits where it does

Minerva grades L3 on three police officers describing one event, all of them named in one video. The outside record backs it with a catalogue entry from 1964 and a recorded interview with the principal witness, and it suggests more officers saw the objects than our telling knows about. None of that paperwork is yet in the archive's holdings. What the Minerva patrolmen watched before dawn is not resolved here.